Friday, 28 September 2012

The Unanswered Question About Apple Maps

I agree with almost everyone else that Tim Cook was right to quickly apologize for the problems with Apple Maps. If you're in the US, you can contrast his handling of the situation to the National Football League's handling of its referee lockout. The lesson: Deny a problem and the public will feed on you like wolves on a crippled buffalo. Acknowledge the problem and people will give you a second chance. The apology is especially effective if it comes from a person (not a corporate statement) and sounds sincere. Most of us want to be nice to one another, and a personal apology taps into that reflex.

So fine, I'm sure Apple will fix the app eventually, and in six months this whole thing will probably be a distant memory.

What I'm wondering about is a much more serious problem that may not be solved in six months, and that (unlike the Maps app itself) threatens Apple's long-term prosperity. The question:

How in the world did Apple make a mistake like this in the first place?

I'm not talking about shipping an unsatisfying app; that happens to any company. I'm talking about making an obviously underwhelming and unfinished app a centerpiece in a critically important new product announcement. If you have an app that isn't perfect yet, position it that way. Tell people that it's just getting started and needs more work. Instead, Apple execs gushed about Maps on stage. Scott Forstall made it the first feature in his iOS 6 demo, and spent more than two and a half minutes talking about it (link). This sort of mismatch between message and delivery is a sign that Apple's product management and review process failed utterly somewhere along the line.

It's a little bit like NASA launching the space shuttle Challenger when people in the organization knew it might blow up. The issue is not that there were flaws, it's that they went ahead with the launch despite the flaws.

Of course nobody has been killed by Apple Maps, so it's a very different sort of problem. But both are related to organizational culture and business practices. Like NASA's culture of safety, Apple is supposed to have a culture of great product functionality. It's the center of what makes the company special. That process failed spectacularly in the case of Apple Maps, and speaking as somebody who spent years reporting into the product management organization at Apple, there is absolutely no excuse for what happened.

Apple's marketing machine is so powerful that any major failure in a marquee feature gets magnified enormously. Even Google can probably get away with a big feature failure or two; you expect Android to be a bit loose around the edges, and lord knows Google backtracks on initiatives all the time. But Apple claims that it will amaze and delight us with its new products, and so people naturally expect greatness. It's what justifies the intense coverage of Apple's announcements.

There are several possible explanations for what went wrong, all of them bad. Maybe:

--The product managers on Apple Maps knew it had problems but didn't think users would care. Or

--The managers of Apple Maps knew there were problems, and reported the problems, but were ignored by middle management. Or

--Maybe Apple has become so insular and self-satisfied that no one there realized the difference between a good looking maps app and a usable one.

It comes down to this: are you incompetent, bureaucratic, or out of touch?

Screw-ups like this happened occasionally at Apple under Steve Jobs. Someone once described to me the experience of being in a group that was pulled into a meeting with Steve where he said, "you let me down, and you let the company down." My friend said it was one of the worst feelings ever, and it also resulted in job changes for the people responsible. That may be something Tim Cook will need to do. But he also needs to ask some deeper questions. Is this just a failure of a particular manager or team, or is there a cultural or process problem that needs to be fixed? That's a very tough question to answer. You don't want to mess up the culture and practices that Steve left behind, but at the same time you can't permit this sort of mistake to become a routine event.

When I was at Apple back in the 1990s, before Steve returned, we had a joke we told on ourselves:

Q: What's the difference between an Apple salesman and a used-car salesman?A: The used car salesman knows when he's lying.